Notes from Underwater

In the two-hundred-metre individual medley this year, in London, Michael Phelps beat his rival and fellow-American Ryan Lochte to win his sixteenth gold medal. The race was wonderful to watch, not only for the rivalry but for the camera work and for the swimmers’ extraordinary physiques. We’re practically in the pool with them as their monstrous shoulders fling arms over the surface and their smooth torsos and legs ripple through an underwater flutter kick. Watching Lochte and Phelps travel impossible distances with each stroke, I thought of the poet Maxine Kumin’s description of a swimmer racing. “Thrift is his wonderful secret; he has schooled out all extravagance.”

Like running, swimming is a sport but not a game. Nor does it involve much strategy. It comes down to technique, speed, strength, will. Uncommon physical characteristics help. Phelps, who has now won more Olympic medals (twenty-two) than any athlete in history, has a wingspan that is four inches longer than his height (six-foot-four), and his ankles are double-jointed. Lynne Cox, a marathon swimmer who has crossed the Bering Strait in only a Speedo, has an unusually even and thick layer of fat, like a seal—some thirty-five per cent of her body weight. There is also something mysterious that great swimmers have, “a ‘feel’ for the water,” as Leanne Shapton writes in her new book, “Swimming Studies.” What this means is both self-evident and indefinable. It just is.

Shapton, best known as an illustrator, swam competitively in her youth in Ontario, Canada, racing her way as far as the Olympic trials. Her book is a meditation on the gruelling years of training, the ways swimming is refracted through her memory now, and the places where she has swum as an adult. Its brief chapters are mini-essays with titles like “Doughnuts,” “Studebakers,” “Size,” “Goggles,” and “Piña Colada.” She’s not interested in the champion’s trajectory. She concentrates on the quiet rituals, the moments of ambivalence.

I was a competitive swimmer, and I have never read anything that captured the sport so well. Shapton knows just the details to include: the double steel doors that the coach opens during practice, and the clouds of chlorinated steam that puff out into the winter night; the way you rub your hands across a starting block’s rough surface to make them “raw and more sensitive in the water”; her coach’s soggy gray socks and deck sandals (you are always looking up at your coach); and racers’ dives: “a tiny midair push-up, followed by a small flex at their hips.” She describes and re-describes her inevitable obsession with time, with “the ability to make still lifes out of tenths of seconds.”

Diana Nyad, another marathon swimmer, says swimming is “the loneliest sport in the world.” In a pool, you’re staring at a line on the bottom; in open water, you’re mostly staring into a murky, hallucinatory vastness. In either place, you’re alone with your thoughts, and your pain, submerged for long periods. I had a coach, Kip, who said that good swimmers must be smart. What he meant was that they must be comfortable in their heads; they must be able to withstand, even enjoy, long stretches of conversation with themselves.

Shapton’s book captures the mental state that is unique to the monotony of laps in a pool. Thoughts have an unmoored, weightless quality. They drift, circle, repeat, and weave together according to a rhythm maintained by counted breaths (I alternate sides, breathing every three strokes) and punctuated by flip turns like cymbal flourishes. You never know quite where Shapton is going with an anecdote. It’s like one of the pleasures of swimming—the unexpected places that the mind will wander.

The second half of her book is full of scenes from her worldly, lush adulthood: visiting the Peter Zumthor-designed pools of the Hotel Therme Vals, in Switzerland; chatting with Lucian Freud about her drawings and the pool in the London hotel where she was staying. Remarkably, the contrast between these luxurious adventures and her ascetic, middle-class adolescence with the Etobicoke Swim Club is not particularly stark. Both eras are recounted with equal delicacy and acuity. What could get tiresome—her jet-setting, design-blog-ready depictions of watery encounters—is instead a pleasure because we know her from the pool--from her vivid, gentle account of those rubber-cap days. Her sparse, satisfying prose is your guide, and you’re glad to get to swim beside her.

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“I believed, for a while, in the aphrodisiacal qualities of my swimming,” Shapton writes. Sex and swimming go way back. The first swimmer in Western literature was Leander. He swam a mile across the Hellespont each night to see his lover, Hero. She guided him into port with a torch. Then, one night, storm winds blew out the torch and Leander drowned. Hero, devastated, flung herself into the sea. Lord Byron swam the Hellespont, in 1810, and found it tough going, “so much so, that I doubt whether Leander’s conjugal powers must not have been exhausted in his passage to Paradise.” (Shapton’s belief did not survive her experience, either. After watching one of her swim meets, her husband was “like a man who has just sat through an interesting lecture and is now peckish.”)

Nothing daunted, D. H. Lawrence considered, in “Women in Love,” a swimming man, watched by women, to embody a kind of sexual ideal. “The whole otherworld, wet and remote, he had to himself…. The sisters stood watching the swimmer move further into the grey, moist, full space of the water, pulsing with his own small, invading motion…. He loved his own vigorous, thrusting motion, and the violent impulse of the very cold water against his limbs, buoying him up.” The women are moved. One says, “It is one of the impossibilities of life, for me to take my clothes off now and jump in.” The other observes, “It’s so wet,” plainly meaning, in context, the lake.

New England (and English) witch trials, with their subtext of sexual judgment, sometimes included a swimming test. A bound suspect thrown in the water would, under one theory, be buoyed up, if innocent, by the hand of God. Under another theory, those who floated were being rejected by the water, which represented baptism, and were therefore witches, while those who sank (and sometimes drowned) were innocent. Benjamin Franklin wrote a newspaper story about a witch trial in New Jersey in which two women flunked the swimming test, floating guiltily. But then, according to Franklin, the community realized that it might have been the shifts they were allowed to wear buoying them up, and it was decided to wait for warmer weather, when the women could be re-tested nude. (There is no evidence that this trial actually happened. Franklin was probably just having a laugh at lascivious witch hunters.)

Long before bikinis, Annette Kellerman, an Australian silent-film star and professional swimmer—she was the first woman to attempt to swim the English Channel, in 1905—became an international sex symbol by fighting for the right to wear a head-to-toe one-piece bathing suit. She was arrested for indecency, in 1907, on Revere Beach, Massachusetts, for wearing a suit that ended at her thighs. In 1916, she became the first major actress to appear fully nude in a film. Her book, “How to Swim,” published in 1918, got a good review in the Times.

John Cheever gave the world its dripping antihero, Neddy Merrill, in his story “The Swimmer,” which appeared in this magazine in 1964. Merrill, a hard-drinking suburbanite, decides to leave a party and go home the hard way, swimming through a long chain of Westchester County pools. “To be embraced and sustained by the light green water was less a pleasure, it seemed, than the resumption of a natural condition, and he would have liked to swim without trunks, but this was not possible, considering his project.” Merrill’s journey turns dark, his anxiety thickens, and his body grows weary and sore. Time warps. He loses his mistress, his wife and children, his social confidence, and, when he finally arrives home, his house is dark and abandoned. Swimming, submersion, offer no salvation from age and ruin in Cheever country.

What we can know through swimming is not ecstatic release but what Leanne Shapton calls “the life of the body.” She describes swimming in London, in the freezing Hampstead Heath Ladies’ Pond: “I circle again and my body feels warm, but it is the warmth of a slap: blood rushing the flesh.” Swimming becomes, with the years, a kind of athlete’s madeleine. “When I swim now, I step into the water as though absentmindedly touching a scar.”